


You've Been Right In Front Of Me (Why Didn't I See?)

by SereneCalamity



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments (Movies), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe, Escaping it together, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Not between Clace, Partners to Lovers, Sort of partners, bad childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 04:47:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17574182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SereneCalamity/pseuds/SereneCalamity
Summary: They were a little messy, but both of them were fine with what they had.





	You've Been Right In Front Of Me (Why Didn't I See?)

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt from my beautiful Reppinda5o3, from the song Ultimate by Lindsay Lohan. I hope you enjoy, boo.  
> Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or the title.

Clarissa Morgenstern collapsed onto the couch, letting out a dramatic sigh and closing her eyes. She let her body relax for all of a minute before she let out a groan and arched her back, reaching underneath her and fumbling around for whatever it was that digging into her bag. She grasped the sharp object and pulled it out, holding the belt with a thick buckle up in front of her face and letting out an annoyed huff and throwing it toward the chipped and scratched table a few feet away. It missed the low coffee table, falling to the floor, making a loud thunking noise as the buckle hit the wooden floors, but Clary didn't care.

It wasn't like it was  _hers_.

Besides, it was tacky, and it was one of those cheap things that Jace Herondale brought to wear when he was tending bar at the booty club place that he worked.

"Are you throwing my shit?!" Came a shout from one of the tiny rooms in the two bedroomed apartment. Clary rolled her eyes up at the ceiling, making a face at his annoyed tone.

"Well, maybe if your  _shit wasn't lying around_!" Clary shouted back at him. "Then I wouldn't  _be throwing it!_ "

"Fuck off!" Jace shouted back. "Your shit is always around the place!" He was in a bad mood, but so was Clary. She had just come off a twelve hour shift at a waitressing job that she knew she was going to get fired from soon, because the manager had a hard on for one of the younger girls and Clary kept getting in the way when he was trying to make a move on her. "Case and  _motherfucking_   _point_!" His voice sounded closer and Clary reluctantly opened her eyes to where he was standing in the doorway between his room and the pokey lounge and then a bright red thong was being slingshot across the room, smacking her directly in the face.

His aim was clearly better than hers.

" _Fuck you_!" Clary yelled.

"Fuck you  _right back_!" Jace snapped, pulling the fingers at her before storming back into his room. Clary grabbed the thong off her face, frowned at it and then felt anger twist her stomach over.

"This isn't _even mine_! It's one of your  _skanks_!" She groaned as she got off the couch, storming towards his room and throwing it back at where Jace was stretched over his bed, folding the corners down perfectly and tucking the pillows together, _just right_. She really didn't know why he did that, because it was just going to get messed up a few hours later.

Sometimes sooner.

Clary threw the thong at Jace, and with the closer proximity, she actually made her target, and the thong whipped against the side of his face, hanging over his shoulder. Jace's hand came up, snatching the thong off his shoulder and looking at it.

"Oh," he let out a snort. "This is actually mine." Clary narrowed her eyes at his back. Jace turned around, the anger on his face gone—going as quickly as it had come—and he smirked at her. Clary's anger wasn't quite as quick to go, and she was already feeling shit after her day, and the she had just wanted to fall asleep on the couch, except there had been something stabbing her in the fucking back and then she was getting yelled at by her asshole roommate.

And sometimes lover.

But definitely not friend.

No.

They weren't  _friends_.

They were just...Thrown together by circumstance.

"Classy," Clary curled her upper lip at him.

"You took a few beats to realize they weren't yours," Jace smirked as he turned around to look at her. "Which means you have a pair similar..." he leaned forward, bending down unfairly, given his over six foot stature while Clary stood at a petitie five foot two, wiggling his eyebrows at her. "In fact, I know for  _certain_  you have a similar pair. If I remember correctly, they have little bows on the sides, and I ripped a hole down the—"

" _Shut it_ ," Clary snapped, her hand whipping up and covering his mouth with her hand. She could see his golden eyes dancing, which just made her glare even more, and then she dropped her hand to her side and stormed out of the room. Her own room was directly next to his, and it was just as small, although hers looked even tinier given he was a bit of a minimalist and kept everything tidy and tucked away while Clary's room kind of just looked like someone threw up a bunch of colourful clothes and art supplies and magazines. She shoved some clothes off to the side of her bed, flopping down and falling asleep, still dressed in her work uniform.

* * *

"You drank the last of the milk? What the  _fuck_ , Jace?! You know I need coffee before I go to work!" Clary was grousing as she stared into the fridge.

To be fair, there wasn't much in the fridge, at all, it wasn't just the milk that they were out of, but it was the milk that she had been hanging out for, for her beloved coffee.

"I need coffee too!" Jace snapped, sipping from the chipped cup that he had snagged from an opshop when they had first moved in together. It had actually been quite funny, seeing Jace in an opshop when the rich boy had never set foot in a place without a designer name before, but Clary couldn't think about that right now.

"You take your coffee  _black_. You don't need  _milk_ ," she hissed out at him and Jace just shrugged, continuing to drink from his cup. Clary let out a growl before slamming the fridge door shut, a little too heavily, and there was a rattle from the pots and pans that they had piled on top before she stormed over to Jace and snatched the coffee cup out of his hands. Jace watched her with raised eyebrows as she took a big mouthful of coffee.

It was obvious from the way her face twisted that she hated every drop, but she forced herself to drink down several mouthfuls, just to spite him.

"Fuck you," she snipped, grabbing her bag off the kitchen bench as she turned for the door, an apple in her other hand.

"Have a good day at work, honey," Jace sung out with a smug smile, reaching out to slap her on the ass and earning himself another glare.

* * *

The pair of them didn't  _always_  fight.

Actually.

They did.

They always had.

Jace and Clary had met when they were fourteen—Jace had moved to Idris with his father after he had been fired from his job in New York. The tiny town didn't really give him anywhere to hide or any outlet for his anger, and so everyone in the town knew that his dad beat on him, and everyone in town knew that he had anger management issues. He would constantly be coming into school with bruises and he would be continuously getting into fights with people. Even when he was fourteen, he would take on seniors, and a lot of the times, he would win.

Clary had steered clear from him for a while, and she had never really come up on his radar, the girl who sat at the back of the classroom with her head down and her red hair practically shielding her from the world. She had never really paid much attention to him either, she didn't really pay attention to  _anyone_ really, especially some angry guy in the glass who always got into fights. They had sort of crashed together when they had been paired together on a Biology project when they were fifteen.

Jace had been at her place studying when her father had come home, yelled at her for being useless and as stupid as her mother when he saw that she hadn't done the dishes or prepared dinner, and Clary had been sitting on the floor in his room when his father stumbled in, drunk off his face, and had hit on her relentlessly before smacking Jace in the face. Another time, Jace had dropped Clary off at her place and her father had screamed from the front porch that she was a whore, being dropped off after giving Jace her  _services_ and Clary had gotten to Jace's house late one afternoon for a study session and seen Stephen Herondale kicking Jace from where he was curled up on the ground.

They hadn't...They had never really  _talked_  about it.

Both of them were caught up with their own shit, and as teenagers, they really didn't have the emotional capacity to deal with many more problems than what were outside of their own bubbles, but they shared  _something_.

When Clary snapped at Jace for sitting next to her and spreading his shit out over her desk, he didn't get angry with her. He would snap back, but it wouldn't be with the normal viciousness that he responded to others. When Jace teased her about getting caught giving a blowjob to the school douchebag, Sebastian Verlac, she didn't give him a black eye like she had to Jordan Kyle. There were a lot of angry words exchanged between the two of them, but there was never much  _heat_  behind them.

He didn't judge her for sleeping her way through the people in their grade in an unhealthy way to try and validate herself, and she didn't judge him for having such a short fuse and lashing out.

They weren't  _friends_.

They were...Allies, maybe.

They were... _More than that_  but she wasn't sure what they were exactly.

The night of their graduation—or, the _morning after_  graduation, they had graduated around two o'clock on Thursday afternoon, and Jace had shown up at at one thirty in the morning on Friday—he had asked her to leave. He had tapped on the window that was next to her bed and hadn't looked at all sorry as she had pulled open her window and glared at him. Her hair was a mess and her make up from the day was smeared, and she was wearing an oversized shirt that he was pretty sure belonged Jordan, who he vaguely remembered seeing her with at a party a few days ago, even though they had hated each other for a long time after she had broken his nose.

He had a split lip, an eye that was already swelling shut and blood crusting around his nose, and all he had was a rundown car that had belonged to his mother and a bag of clothes, and he was asking this girl to _run away with him_.

Then she  _said yes_.

Clary hadn't even thought about it.

She'd just said yes and told him she would be a couple of minutes. Jace had watched as she moved around her room, keeping quiet so as not to wake her father, packing a bag while just wearing a shirt and underwear. Then she was climbing out the window—still without pants—and had followed him to his car, throwing her bag in the back seat and then getting in the passenger side. Somewhere between her house and the township, she wiggled into a pair of leggings, and the they stopped at the ATM in the town and drew out everything they had in their bank accounts, which wasn't a lot, but it was a start.

They had struggled a hell of a lot.

They both got shitty jobs that they couldn't hold down, and they had managed to scrape together enough for an apartment that was the size of a shoebox. They took turns sleeping on the ratty couch and the mattress on the floor, as they scrimped and saved and worked two jobs at a time before managing to move to an apartment with two actual rooms.

They were getting there.

 _Together_.

The first the time that they had slept together, it was the day after the anniversary of Jace's mothers death. They didn't talk for a couple of days after, both of them adjusting to the shift in their relationship. And then things went back to how they had been before, existing together, only seeing one another an hour or so a day, between jobs and sleeping. There had been a few more run ins where they had ended up in bed together—or on the couch, or the kitchen bench—but it wasn't really something that they spoke about. It was just a thing that happened sometimes.

Usually when Clary needed to be with someone who was going to stay afterwards and run his fingers down her back and play with her hair.

Usually when Jace needed someone familiar, someone he knew wasn't just there for a fuck, someone who was comforting.

Sometimes when they just needed a person that they could rely on.

They didn't admit that to each other, but as time went by—as weeks turned into months, and then months turned into a year, and then a year turned into two—other people coming back to their apartment wasn't really a thing anymore. Sometimes it happened, it wasn't as though there was any rule that they couldn't, but they had both just sort of stopped. Since Clary was fourteen, this was the longest that she had gone without having sex—and that included with Jace, because they hadn't had sex in nearly four months at this point.

And it felt good.

Even if she was working at a job she hated, she really liked two of the girls that she worked with, Maia Roberts and Kaelie Whitewillow. And she worked two nights a week a karaoke bar where there was a nerdy kid, Simon Lewis, who had been trying to force his friendship onto her since she had started there, and she was hesitantly coming around, even if she found his mile-a-minute chatter a little overwhelming. She was a hell of a lot more comfortable in her skin that she had been since she was a little girl and her mother was still around.

She owed that to Jace.

He was the one who had just showed up one day and rescued her.

And maybe their relationship could be tempestuous, but she valued it, even if she didn't tell him that.

* * *

"Well," Magnus Bane smiled as he looked Jace up and down. "Golden Boy, you're definitely my biggest winner here." Jace smirked and wiggled his eyebrows at Magnus as he continued to pull out of the waistband of the ridiculously tight jeans that he was wearing, smoothing out the dollar bills and putting them on the table, next to the piles already made by Raphael Santiago, Bat Velasquez and Duncan Armstrong, and it was true, his pile at the most.

He grinned.

This really hadn't been a job that he could imagine himself doing when he was younger—or, hell—even a year ago, but Magnus' club had been introduced to him by Raphael, who he had tended bar with for a short while. It wasn't  _quite_  a strip club, but it was pretty damn close, and there were literal strippers who did come in a perform every few weeks. All of the wait staff were men, with two girls working behind the bar, safely away from any groping hands of drunk patrons, and the men were always... _At least_  half undressed.

Sometimes more.

Raphael had no problem walking around in his briefs.

Jace only stripped down to the thong that Magnus insisted he wear to show off his 'magnificent behind' on special occasions.

"Alright, well, I'm going to finish off here," Magnus said after a few more minutes. "Do you want me to switch your tips out to bigger notes?" He teased and Jace rolled his eyes.

"There's something... _Appreciative_  about having all these single notes," he grinned as he picked up the pile, flattening them as much as he could before shoving them into his wallet. Magnus called out his goodbyes after him before adding in,

"Say hello from me to your better half!" Jace just waved over his shoulder, not replying.

Magnus was adamant that Jace and Clary were together, even if Jace refuted it over and over again.

It took Jace nearly half an hour to walk back to their apartment building. Sometimes he would take a bus, but it was a clear night tonight—at least as clear as a night sky could get in New York—and so he decided to walk. He'd thrown on a jacket over the henley he was wearing, and it kept him warm in the autumn breezing that was blowing through the busy streets. It wasn't  _quite_  cold yet, because they were only a few weeks into autumn, but it was getting a little nippy. When Jace got home, the whole apartment was dark and completely silent. Jace took off his jacket, laying it over the back of one of the two mismatched kitchen chairs that they had, and then taking his wallet out of his back pocket and dropping it and his keys on the tiny table.

Clary must either be asleep or out with one of the girls from her work. It was almost two in the morning, so it would make sense that she was asleep, or if she was out, she would probably be back soon. Jace walked to Clary's bedroom, making sure to be quiet, just like he always was when checking on her. She would be pissed if he knew that this was a nightly routine for him, whenever he came in after her, but he couldn't help it.

New York was dangerous and Clary was...His roommate.

His sort-of person?

The closest thing on the this earth that he considered family.

He wouldn't call her his friend, because they had skipped right over that, but they were important to each other.

And she was small and in this scary city because of him, so he couldn't help but be a little... _Concerned_  at times.

Jace got to the bedroom and looked inside, and noted that her room was empty. At least, empty of Clary, because the room was the complete  _opposite_  of empty. It was overflowing with everything else. He twisted his lips together, walking back into the kitchen. He would wait up for her, until she got home, but he would have to make sure it didn't  _look_  like he was waiting, because she got annoyed when she thought he was  _babysitting_ her or some other shit. Jace had tried to argue at one point that it wasn't  _that_ , he was just...Checking up on her, but she had pulled the fingers and not talked to him for the rest of the day. So he opened the fridge to pull out a beer, and he noted the bottle of milk that he had brought before going to work had a sticky note on it. He snatched it off and read it in the dim light from the fridge.

 _You're still an asshole_ , was written in Clary's loopy writing.

Jace snorted and crumbled up the note, tossing it toward the rubbish bin. He took out a beer and turned around, and that was when he noted that the window above the sink was pushed halfway up, and Clary was sitting outside.

Smoking.

That was a bad habit that had rubbed off from him.

Jace stared through the window, to where Clary was sitting on the steps of the fire escape outside. She was mainly in the dark, only a few glints of light from the apartments and billboards across the street from them. Jace made a face as he hitched himself up on the kitchen bench, pushed up the window and awkwardly wriggled through it. It was a whole lot easier for her to get out this way with her petite frame, than it was for him. She barely looked at him, only shuffling over a little to make room for him.

"Hey," Jace began and Clary made a humming noise in response. She didn't say anything else, and she just puffed away on her cigarette, her shoulders tense and hunched slightly. He pursed his mouth, wondering if he had forgotten something.

It wasn't her birthday.

It wasn't her mothers birthday.

It wasn't the day her mother left.

It wasn't the day they had run away.

"You alright?" He grunted, feeling a bit awkward, because they really weren't good with this sort of stuff. Last time she had been looking this detached it had been the day after her birthday, and her father had rung her to rip into her for not coming home to see him. Not that there was any reason why she  _should_  go back. The guy was a prick and if Clary never saw him again, it would be too soon.

"I'm fine," Clary's words were quiet, but they weren't curt, so Jace was inclined to believe her. Jace nodded a few times, looking away from her, down the nine storeys to the ground through the gaps in the grating. He noted with a raised eyebrow that there were a couple of other beer bottles on the steps below them, all empty. Even if something wasn't wrong, he still knew that something was going on. She didn't usually drink, that his vice, not hers.

"How many you had?" Jace asked, waving his finger at the glass bottles, glancing at Clary who was very pointedly finishing the bottle she had in her hand, even though there was definitely more than a mouthful there. Once she finished, she put the bottle down, turned her head away to burp and then gave him a pointed look.

" _All_  of them," she replied, and he knew that was a jab for finishing off the milk. He just rolled his eyes and reached over to pluck the cigarette out of her fingers, pressing it between his lips and breathing in. Clary's eyebrows furrowed for a moment, watching him before she looked up, toward the skies, eyebrows still pulled together. She let out a deep breath, as though she was prepping herself for something. "I think I might love you someday," she stated, her voice quiet but firm.

Jace choked on the smoke he had just inhaled, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth as coughed, holding it away from him. His eyes even watered a little bit, something that hadn't happened in  _years_.

Clary gave him a disinterested look before taking the cigarette off him and inhaling, doing it smoothly, unlike Jace. When she let out a long stream of hazy smoke, she handed it back to him. When he didn't take it, she glanced toward him.

He was staring at her.

"What?" Clary frowned at him. Jace sputtered for a moment, and he threw up his hands, shifting around on the step so that he could face her.

"You can't—you just—You  _can't just_ —" Jace sputtered out and Clary rolled her eyes at him, stubbing out the cigarette on the metal of the railing beside her and then letting it tumble over the side.

"Fucking hell, Jace, settle down," she wiped her hands on her jeans and shuffled forward on the step, as though she was about to get up. "I didn't tell you I  _did_  love you. Just..." she shrugged. "The potential is there." Jace narrowed his eyes at her as she stood up, moving toward the window when Jace caught her arm and give her a sharp tug. " _Shit_!" Clary squeaked as she was pulled off balance. One arm went out to balance herself against the wall of the building while the other landed on Jace's shoulder. He reached out, wrapping an arm around her thigh and pulling until she was jerked forward onto his lap. Clary's eyes were hesitant as she looked at him, body tense under his hands, making sure her ass was perched on his knees, rather than sliding forward with her thighs pressed to his hips.

"I can't say that to you," Jace told her, his voice serious, and Clary's expression didn't change. Her eyes didn't change—they didn't soften or look pitying—and she didn't try and  _say_  anything.

That was one of the perfect things about her.

She knew that the way his father had treated him had broken something inside of him, something that he didn't know would ever be fixed or healed, and she still didn't treat him like there was something wrong with him.

"I don't know if I ever will," he continued and Clary arched an eyebrow, waiting. "But...I think you're it for me, Clary."

"How romantic," she snorted, and Jace couldn't help but grin, because even though she was acting as though it was no big deal, he felt her body relax, and he knew that even though she wasn't going to say anything, she was relieved. Jace looped an arm around her and pulled her in close, and she slid down his thighs, feet awkwardly bent underneath her and pressed against the metal steps. He leaned forward and their mouths came together. She tasted like beer and cigarettes and underneath it, she tasted like Clary, which was the most comforting taste he had ever been allowed to enjoy.

He was half hard in his jeans, and when his hand stroked up Clary's back, fingers trailing over her spine through the hoodie she was wearing, he felt her twitch underneath it, and he knew that she was on her way to getting aroused.

He didn't push it, though.

He was happy with just kissing her.

When Clary pulled back, there was a slick sound of their tongues and lips parting, and in the glint of the flashing billboard and lights from above them, he could see the shine of spit on her mouth. Jace lifted his hand, the pad of his thumb touching the curve of her cheekbone, slowly following it before pressing it to the corner of her mouth. Clary's eyelashes fluttered as her eyes closed once, then twice and then they met his gaze.

"I said I  _might_  one day. Don't think it's a done deal," she told him, although her voice was soft and intimate, and he could feel her breath warm on his lips.

"I would never presume," Jace gave her a small smile, that he had probably intended as at least a half smirk, but was too gentle for that.

Because that was them.

After sitting there for another few minutes, Jace nudged Clary inside. He disappeared into the shower while she sat on the couch, turning on the TV and scrolling through Netflix to find something that she liked and that he would tolerate, because she knew that he would come to sit with her once he was done.

She had lied.

There was no 'might'.

But neither of them were ready for that right now, and that was okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think x


End file.
